The FA Cup Final has been on the wane as a sporting event over the last three decades, but in some senses it’ll never stop mattering.
For a country that is constantly crowing about its status as the ‘home of football’, England sure does love ripping up that history. When it suddenly – and in some cases painfully – became apparent in the mid to late 1980s that dozens of grounds had been allowed to run to seed and that many would need to be renovated or rebuilt, little serious attention was paid to preservation of the past. Bricks and mortar were swept away to be replaced by plate glass and steel.
Something similar could be said for the FA Cup, although it should also be added that at least the new generation of stadia are broadly more comfortable and definitely safer than their predecessors, while the world’s oldest football tournament remains in the doldrums, slowly eroded by a combination of tinkering with a winning format, increasing disinterest from clubs and subsequently supporters, and a shift both in club priorities and financial parity.
Having been born in 1972 in north London, my formative years as a football supporter were forged by the FA Cup. In 1981, at the end of my first full season as a fan, Spurs reached the FA Cup final while my local non-league team, Enfield, reached a fourth-round replay. The following year, Enfield lost narrowly to Crystal Palace in the third round but reached the final of the FA Trophy, non-league football’s equivalent to the FA Cup, also at Wembley, on the Saturday before Spurs played QPR at the same venue. Enfield beat Altrincham 1-0 on the first Saturday and 11 days later Spurs won after a replay.
I more or less presumed that winning the FA Cup was a naturally occurring phenomenon for Spurs, even though I was vaguely aware of the fact that they’d previously not even reached a final since before I was born. I was given a rude awakening when they were dumped out in the fifth roun by Everton the following…
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